by Giles Foden
Queller stared at the back of Altenburg’s head. Brown hair cut square at the nape. A little spot. He was telling the driver something up front. How the government had printed tens of thousands of images of bin Laden’s face on leaflets, together with notice of a reward (it had been upped to $5 million). The Air Force was going to parachute them over Afghanistan in the next few weeks.
Would they ever catch up with him? Bin Laden would be moving his camp every few days, Queller reckoned. Right now he could be setting off once more: in a convoy of shiny four-by-fours not unlike this one, disappearing into Afghanistan’s epic landscape, winding like a metallic snake into the mountain labyrinth, long before more Tomahawks, relentless but never infallible, could pinpoint him again.
He looked across at Nick and Miranda. She had fallen asleep as well now, her face grey under the heavy dark fringe. Whenever they hit a bump or pothole or swerved to avoid a cyclist, the eyes of one or the other would flicker open, register Queller for a second and then close again. Between them on the seat, their hands lay limp like two dead fish. Queller wondered whether they would last as a couple. All that stuff about adversity bringing people together – he wasn’t sure he believed all that.
The convoy had passed into Dar’s commercial district. The traffic was pandemonium. Queller stared out of the window, watching signs and billboards flash past like a rapid series of hallucinations: Envi Skin Cream – ‘YOU TOO CAN LOOK LIKE THIS’– Nido Milk, Kargill Seeds, Standard Bank, Shell, Kahawa by Nestlé: ‘THE STRONGEST BREW’, Carlsberg Green and Carlsberg Brown: ‘BEST FOR THE TOWN AND THE COUNTRY’. The signs didn’t tell the whole tale, to Queller’s mind. There was something missing, some knife or razor, some way to cut through the endless web of the companies that produced these goods.
Of one thing he was certain. The worldwide spread of trade was in the main a force for good, but it often came with a price. Sometimes it seemed to force nations into a kind of splendid vassalage, where the restraining element outweighed the beneficial one. The erosion of local enterprise, unfair pricing systems, the replacement of democracy by corporate power, a general loss of identity and will … While the multinationals were often either stepping into the shoes of corrupt and brutal regimes, or simply going hand-in-glove with them, all these factors contributed to the growth of fundamentalisms, even if they were not directly responsible. It was an expensive way to grow your business, if one took a long view.
Taking the war to the terrorists when they struck wasn’t cheap either, and as likely to make things worse as better. Organisations like al-Qaida might grow stronger if they were attacked – like weeds which, sprayed with tonnes of pesticide, grew resistant to it – as their political consciousness, and capacity for pain, was raised to ever higher levels of intensity. The Israeli situation was a prime example, though since the Oslo Agreement things seemed to be looking up a little.
Maybe there could, in the future, be something like an ecology of terrorism? It would be a planting, a forestalling, a readjustment in the way things were ordered, causing a readjustment in how they were ordained. Was it possible, by replacing economic exploitation and political vandalism with actions that planted seeds of hope, to avoid this kind of thing happening again? A world determined by hope would be forever green; a world ruled by force, continually bursting into flames.
Effects emerged from causes – the fire hidden in the wood, as the Koran had it – and theoretically at least it should be possible to create conditions of improvement. Queller had a vision of a grand redemption, one great system – costly to all, but bringing forth much more good than its price.
Happiness, knowledge, virtue, the real wealth of the human race … these were inestimable gifts, but why should they not be successfully propagated?
It was, he knew, a pipe dream, something that would work only through the sympathy of many governments and corporations. The future was as imponderable as ever. Even with the sophisticated quantative modelling now available, the far-off event one was planning to avoid would dissolve and fade away, lost in the digital chatter of permutation.
Maybe, in any case, it was irresponsible to think of an imaginary period for the removal of evils, and better to think of improving the present. But interventions of any type – military, economic, political – often just seemed to compound the problems. However judicious the planned course of action seemed at the outset, it frequently ended up entwined with the cause, and the good intended held as a prejudice against those who attempted it. Somalia was a prime example: that poor pilot torn to pieces by the mob.
So far as the cause of terror itself went, Queller thought, putting it down to globalisation alone was usually way too simple. It certainly was in this case. Driven by many forces, the reasons for the bombings swarmed as thickly through time as bats from a cave. It was impossible to track the process, to fix where each contributing factor, itself the result of infinite combinations, would brush the future air. And that was not even to begin to consider the psyche and motivations of al-Qaida’s members, or those of its leader, that inward world where – fanned by the rustling wings of repression and desire – the flame of fanaticism grew to a conflagrant mass.
He looked out of the window, where a small boy was pushing along a toy car made of twisted wire. There was innocence in every place, but here among the African poor, whose vicissitudes were so much greater, it glowed star-bright. The continent had its own intense griefs and did not deserve the used griefs of others. How much better, he thought, to be innocent than penitent. Feeling a kind of gluey despair, as if he’d fallen into a pit of tar, he wondered how any good could come of the imminent briefing with Altenburg.
The agent driving the Landcruiser gave a blast on the horn. They were dead in the centre of the city now, next to the clock tower, and here there were more signs still for his eye to absorb: Jambo Snacks, Zanzibar Drop – ‘COLD AND DELICIOUS’. The largest poster, gaudier, flame-licked, advertised something called the Holy Spirit Fire Church. ‘ON SUNDAY JOHN NATHAN TORRANCE TALKS HERE ON THE END-TIME AND THE LIFE TO COME.’
The Landcruiser moved forward, weaving in and out.
33
People were walking around, congregating by the Reflecting Pool or stretching out under the cherry trees. Miranda went over and dipped a hand in the water. Then she climbed the steps and stood between the columns of the edifice, posing for the photograph that no one would take. It was like a promissory note in her head, the thought of that photograph, like a cheque that would never be cashed.
After coming down, she walked along the Mall past the Vietnam Vets Memorial. A wall of polished black granite covered with names. An order of death. There were a number of Powers there, she noted. She carried on further, into the centre of the city, pausing awhile under the impressive obelisk that was the Washington Monument. There was a slightly eerie quality to the structure, as if it were a place of consecration or sacrifice.
She thought about the people who had died in bombings; then, seeing something in the stone, she thought about herself. Some 150 feet up the obelisk was a clear delineation in the shading of the marble: she wondered if her life was going to be like that now. Before the bomb/after the bomb. It was a very different Miranda Powers who had gone to Africa. Yet in another way she felt a kind of resentment against the world for not having allowed her to move on.
She continued on up towards Federal Square, till she stood in front of the brown, fortress-like FBI headquarters – the J. Edgar Hoover building where, the previous day, she’d had an appointment with Mort Altenburg. Further debriefing. What had caught her attention most were the posters of the Bureau’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, chief among them Osama bin Laden. There was something disturbingly saintly and seductive about the man’s eyes. He looked more like a Greek icon – John the Baptist or someone – than a James Bond-type evil genius. It was hard to envisage that he had been the cause of all the havoc and the slaughter, just as it was hard to imagine that he might never be brought to justice.
Altenburg had told her the investigation was ongoing, and that they had a lead on Khaled. Bin Laden himself had issued further threats. Altenburg had added that Jack Queller was under investigation ‘for various reasons’, but wouldn’t go into details. All inquiries into her own competence had been halted. There was to be no disciplinary hearing. Currently on discretionary leave, she would take up a new post in a month – in Washington itself, Kirsteen’s department, the one that looked after visiting diplomats and heads of state.
Hungry, she went to a Starbucks a little way down from the Hoover building. She didn’t usually go into them, they were too regimented for her, but there was nowhere else nearby. Ray, who was out of hospital now, hated the chain with a passion. He’d left the service, and gone to live in San Francisco on a State Department pension. The city was, he said in a letter, ‘like a second Eden’ – but she suspected he was just putting a brave face on things. He would have to use walking sticks for the rest of his life.
She ordered a skinny latte and a granola bar and sat thinking about Nick. She’d tried to persuade him to stay in Washington, but he wouldn’t. It was inevitable, she guessed. They had been thrown together by events, and now events had drawn them apart. But it hurt her still, she was surprised how much.
She opened her purse and took out the little turtleshell he’d given her. She let it rest on the palm of her hand. The interleaved shell was full of soft orange fires, each layer ministering light from the down-lamps of the table. It made her sad to look at it, so she put it back. But the sad, solitary thoughts came all the same … She couldn’t, after all, allow herself to believe that it was merely circumstances that had brought them together. Her feelings had grown too strong and, according to his diary, so had his. Had they both, in their separate moments, been deluding themselves about what they’d had? If not, what had it all been for?
This was where her resentment came in. Progression ought to be the order of the world, she believed, but she felt that with Nick at least she hadn’t been allowed to progress. It was as if she were a pendulum continually striking the sides of the clock that contained it, but never breaking through.
She hadn’t been able to get much out of him; he seemed more self-absorbed than ever. He’d said he still had work to do, that maybe when he had finished his contract they might get something together. She told him if he loved her he’d stay here, and instantly regretted saying it. He said she could equally come out to Zanzibar if she liked, and that it was selfish of her to think her job more important than his. That annoyed her, and then she told him there was no way she’d join him.
Was that true? She wondered now. Success in the department had been her goal for so long that she took it for granted as her horizon. But maybe the bombings ought to have changed that; maybe she ought to concentrate on things more valuable than work. Yet it was also true that her work had become – one only had to think for a second of the stricken victims of the attacks – more important than ever now.
And so, hiding her frustration, she had resigned herself to the situation, and turned away after his final kiss, making a safe, straight line back across the asphalt frontage of the DS building. She had watched him, then, from an upper window, crossing by the tennis court and getting into his rental car. All at once she’d felt angry and sad, in love and out of love, tossed like a cork on the ocean.
She glanced at the long noticeboard that ran down one side of the Starbucks. Alongside little cards advertising t’ai chi classes and apartments to rent were pinned pages of that day’s Washington Post. She had read it earlier in the day. The President had vowed not to resign, saying that ‘every American has been broken by something in life’. They were powerful, piercing words, appealing to a general mercy that would free all of fault; yet still she had her doubts about what would happen.
Leaving the Starbucks, Miranda walked up the broad sidewalk a little further, until part of it dipped down, near the Navy Memorial. There was a sunken area there, with a map of the oceans set into the ground like a mosaic. She went and stood over where Zanzibar should have been, and was surprised to find it marked. But then, it was an oceanographic map, and only things like islands and ports and currents were shown.
On either side of her, as she stood on Zanzibar, was a display of bronze statuary, attached to the walls around. One image in particular caught her eye – a petty officer in his bell-bottoms, reefer coat and cap. She walked over to it. The seaman’s hands were in his pockets, his duffel bag by his side. He was gazing into the distance, as if waiting for a ship to arrive at the dockside. The sculptor had ingeniously made the hems of his trousers and the collars of his coat curl in the sea breeze.
She stood there for what must have been half an hour looking at this man. He was slightly hunched, forever waiting on that liberty boat to release him from his prison of bronze. There was something truly heroic in his eyes, something excellent, something of an America where gods still dwelt. Like a child, Miranda reached out and touched his face. Behind her, the wind thrummed the wires on a line of flagstaffs.
She thought of the war the statue commemorated, how those who die in a great cause never really fall. And then, again, she thought of Nick, wanting her to throw it all in. Feeling a stab of sadness, she began walking quickly up the incline, to where the sidewalk retained its normal level. Below her, in the sunken place, the flags continued to wave.
* * *
FBI SEEKS BOMB SUSPECT
by Seymour Ong
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 18, 1998
LAST week the FBI narrowly missed capturing a man suspected of involvement in the attack on the US embassy in Dar-es-Salaam on August 7. Sources named the suspect, a citizen of the East African island of Zanzibar, as Khaled al-Khidr, 23. A complaint seeking his arrest has been filed in the Southern District Court of New York.
On Wednesday, FBI agents and Comoros Island police swooped on a house he had rented in the Comoran capital of Moroni, 200 miles off the east coast of Africa. He had fled there by boat from Zanzibar, the sources said. Al-Khidr, for whom a $2m reward has been posted, had vanished by the time the agents arrived in Moroni.
Since the swoop, al-Khidr has eluded capture, but the wide-reaching FBI investigation into the August 7 bombings is gaining ground. Mort Altenburg, the top FBI official in the investigation, told reporters that ‘amazing advances’ had been made. Altenburg said, ‘We’re starting to unpick a far-flung conspiracy orchestrated by Saudi militant Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida organisation,’ adding that it was the largest overseas investigation in the history of the FBI.
Intelligence analysts and law enforcement agents are still trying to determine the global scope and structure of bin Laden’s organisation and the character of its leader.
‘Some folk think al-Qaida is like the FBI. Others think it’s completely disorganised. I’d say we’re somewhere in between,’ said Altenburg.
‘It’s not the powerhouse it’s made out to be. But they do have some capabilities.’ Altenburg added that the agency was using pattern analysis to compare the August 7 bombings with previous terrorist events. ‘It may be that al-Qaida is responsible for more outrages than we’d thought.’
* * *
Bare-chested, Queller sat on the sofa in his cabin on Aquinnah. The date was October 18. He had collected two items from the post office in Vineyard Haven that morning, and mailed one himself. One of the things he collected was a new arm, the latest model to which he was entitled under the terms of his insurance plan. The other was a letter from the FBI, ordering him to attend an in camera hearing concerning US government links to bin Laden under the Reagan administration.
For some weeks he’d wondered how he might extricate himself, knowing full well he was being set up as the fall guy. But he was weary of evasion. He had told too many lies in his life, lived too long in betrayals, become accustomed to a world where what was under cover found justification in nothing but its own secrecy. Now it wa
s time to stop: to open a door of light. He would be like al-Khidr, the Green Ancient who explains mysteries to ordinary men, making everything public which had been veiled by night.
His familiar bird was singing on the locust tree outside. It made a wavering note, as if falling through gravity. He had spent the previous night writing his version of events – a version which, while it might not have lifted him out of ignominy, at least put another side to the story than the one which, he knew, Altenburg would be telling. It was this text that he had mailed in the Haven – to Miranda Powers. He had sent it to her because he trusted her. Probably that was foolish, but the image of his wife he saw in her face gave him reason enough.
He’d not said what he intended – that he was ready, now, to take his wages: in the present life, in the life to come, in plain view of He from whom not one secret is concealed, who assays all bias, on the right hand and the left, and hears every soul’s whisper. He’d only asked that she do her best to make public the extent to which the US government had, through Pakistan and directly, relations with bin Laden during the eighties and early nineties.
The bird outside flew up, singing so sweetly as it ascended that it might have been entering not the sky but that beloved republic where all are equal, free and undivided. Queller began unrolling the new arm from its bubble wrap. The purpose of this appendage is prosthetic. It must not be used for any other purpose.
It had a specially padded socket, supposed to be the most comfortable on the market, and an advanced gripping mechanism. He strapped it on, then went through to the bedroom of the cabin to look at himself in the mirror. A slight pot belly, freckled, rounded shoulders – over all of this ran the cream-brown straps. Well, it was a little more comfortable than anything he’d had before. He went over to the chest of drawers and, picking out a hand at random, clipped its ratcheted steel prong into the arm. It made a satisfying noise, the noise of something meant to do business. He returned to the lounge.